Compass use policy

Compass exists to help adults notice students who might want a check-in, and to start a supportive conversation. Nothing else.

Prohibited uses

Compass results may not be used for:

• Discipline of any kind, including referrals, detention, suspension, or law enforcement contact.
• Course placement, tracking, or scheduling decisions.
• Program eligibility, including admission to or exclusion from any program, class, team, or activity.
• Any permanent record. Results may not be written into a student's cumulative file, transcript, or any record that follows the student.
• Labeling students. Results may not be described as "risk" levels, scores shared with students' peers, or color codes.
• Training or scoring with demographic data. Race, ethnicity, sex, income or lunch status, disability, English learner status, address, and family background may be used only to audit results, never to score a student.

Required practices

• Flags expire every grading period. Recalculate from current data each period. Never carry a flag forward.
• A person decides. Every suggested check-in is reviewed by a trained staff member. Compass never triggers an automatic action.
• Reasons travel with the suggestion. Staff see why a check-in was suggested, and the student can be told.
• Audit every release. Run compass audit on your own data before use and publish group error rates. Do not use a version that fails the audit without a written explanation.
• Student data stays in the school division. Compass runs on division systems. MANGO never receives student records.

Status

Compass is a prototype tested on synthetic data and one public research dataset. It has not been validated with Virginia students. Do not use it to make decisions about real students until a division has completed a formal validation under a written data agreement consistent with FERPA.